Technorati

Search this blog

Monday, June 2, 2014

Terrence Moore on the twenty-first century global economy

To their credit, the authors of the Common Core, while they are not completely clear on their aims of education, certainly repeat the same phrases concerning their ends again and again. The principal phrase they use is "career and college readiness." On the first page of the introduction to the English Standards, they use that phrase or some variant at least six times in what cannot be more than seven hundred words. It appears throughout the rest of the document, too. Some people might say that the repetition of the phrase produces clarity. Others might say it makes the document sound like a broken record, or that the phrase is like a bad cough that won't go away. Either way, these are their end of education: career and college readiness.

The other phrase that is only slightly less important is "twenty-first century globally competitive society." Anyone who pays attention to what is said about education today has heard this phrase countless times. In fact, it seems to be the only thing that most of the politicians and bureaucrats can say when addressing education. "We have to prepare our young men and women for a twenty-first-century global economy," say all the talking heads. The twenty-first-century global economy, you see, is a very scary thing. It is much carrier than the twentieth-century global economy that we grew up in (though there is no Soviet Union and no Cold War). So we need to do whatever it takes!

[snip]

Slyly but unmistakably, the phrase "twenty-first-century global society," whatever others may mean by it, is being used by the authors of the Common Core to bring about radical, progressive ends of education, ends that would not be supported by the majority of parents if they knew what was really going on in the schools. Thus the insufficient and radical ends of education pursued by the Common Core Standards will make the nation's public schools both less and more than they should be: inferior schools academically, and officious, overreaching schools politically and socially. The remedy to these shortsighted and radical ends is a traditional, classical, liberal education.

He quotes from this part specifically in the common core as well (last paragraph on the page):

http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/R/

The problem is, in my view, that progressive continue to co-opt whatever standards there are into reinforcing useless progressive pedagogy.

One more for the road:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.

(Unfortunately, it shows up in the 11-12th grade band. In fourth grade, where I teach, it asks students to:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.4Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean).

Hirsch makes the point that the people who made the standards could not dictate content knowledge to be taught, because no one would have adopted the standards.

In our district, the parents complain because Common Core isn't progressive enough. They want the project-based learning to come back and the tests to go away. The moms at my kids bus stop grouse constantly that school isn't fun any more.

"Slyly but unmistakably, the phrase "twenty-first-century global society," whatever others may mean by it, is being used by the authors of the Common Core to bring about radical, progressive ends of education, ends that would not be supported by the majority of parents"

And Moore supports this assertion...how, exactly?

The truth is probably that, to sell any set of changes, you have to make them seem appealing. So, they say things that people are likely to agree with and few would find objectionable. (You can't mention things like mathematical fluency or a literary cannon...those things aren't appealing.)

Peter Meyer has at least a couple of posts arguing that CC as written is essentially a Rohrschach blot.

CC does make several references to the importance of knowledge, but to make those stick it would have to say, explicitly, that critical thinking in the absence of knowledge-stored-in-long-term-memory isn't critical thinking.

is being used by the authors of the Common Core to bring about radical, progressive ends of education, ends that would not be supported by the majority of parents

oh gosh .... let me see if I can remember what he says about this, exactly...

I may not be doing justice to his argument, but offhand I'm going to say that he believes the phrase 21st century education is being used to eliminate liberal education from the schools -- or, more accurately, to make sure liberal education doesn't stage a comeback in the wake of Common Core.

He believes that most parents, conservative or liberal, want a liberal education for their children.

"I'm going to say that he believes the phrase 21st century education is being used to eliminate liberal education from the schools -- or, more accurately, to make sure liberal education doesn't stage a comeback in the wake of Common Core.

He believes that most parents, conservative or liberal, want a liberal education for their children."

Interesting...and I don't entirely disagree. The phrase "21st century" in education has come to mean, for me, a devaluation of knowledge in favor of skills. When he calls this trend progressive....well, it's only progressive in the pedagogical sense of the term. I'm politically progressive, and I see progressive education as anathema to progressive (political) goals.

CC does make several references to the importance of knowledge, but to make those stick it would have to say, explicitly, that critical thinking in the absence of knowledge-stored-in-long-term-memory isn't critical thinking.

One of the big underlying assumptions of CC seems to be that schools will be emphasizing content knowledge, and that the standards are just a framework for structuring that knowledge. No one's asking what happens if schools still aren't emphasizing knowledge. But to echo what's been said before, CC would never have gained any traction if it had specified factual information. As far as I'm concerned, nothing will change until the educational establishment is willing to accept the premise that "critical thinking" is something that emerges from concrete, factual knowledge. It doesn't matter how many reforms get introduced if the real problem is never addressed.

CC does make several references to the importance of knowledge, but to make those stick it would have to say, explicitly, that critical thinking in the absence of knowledge-stored-in-long-term-memory isn't critical thinking.

I totally agree, and that seems to echo Dan Willingham's work on the subject. Unfortunately I also agree that there is a thought world that exists that cannot accept non-progressive solutions (especially traditional ones, like lots of "rote" knowledge).

To illustrate:

This year, I met with my assistant principal because I was concerned about the lack of phonics taught in younger grades (I work in an low-income, highly urban school).

I also talked about how increasing background knowledge would really allow students to access more texts, comprehend more, etc.

I was thanked for my opinion and philosophy but told that we would continue to focus on higher-order thinking skills and D5/Cafe.

Hainish wrote: well, it's only progressive in the pedagogical sense of the term. I'm politically progressive, and I see progressive education as anathema to progressive (political) goals.

RIGHT!

Progressivism in the education world is a completely different animal from progressivism in the rest of the world -- to the degree that, in my experience, politically liberal parents are constantly stunned when they discover what "progressive" education actually is these days.

I've pestered Ed to explain to me how Rousseauian romanticism came to be associated with liberalism inside the education world. Romanticism, when it began, was aligned with conservatism (I'm pretty sure).

He has no idea. He once told a friend of ours: "I'm as conservative educationally as I am liberal everything else."

The best I can come up with is that the education world has been so 'protected' from outside influence that it has 'evolved' in strange and unfathomable ways ..... (aren't there languages and gene pools like that? Little pockets of protected weirdness...?)

I definitely agree that progressive education, as defined by education schools, is antagonistic to liberal goals (and I think to conservative goals as well...).

In our elementary schools, ELA is completely standardized across all of the classrooms - they all do exactly the same things at the same time.Up to this year, our schools always used OpenCourt in k-1, which my kids universally hated. I have heard they are getting rid of it because of CC. Yeah! I remember my kids all bringing those horrid little booklets home, and being utterly confused as to why they had to read such meaningless text. I am blanking on what curriculum they are moving to.

Just wondering, since I am no expert (or even newbie) on reading curricula. Where does OpenCourt fall in the phonics wars?

Common Core does specify phonics, but what's going on for me is that the school tries to emphasize analytic phonics rather than systematic synthetic phonics.

I consider this the "whole language hangover". (Balanced Literacy as an idea is part of this.) Everyone accepts that phonics should be taught, but the way they get out of it is to only teach it "as necessary" when the teacher notices the need in reading groups. I had a few discussions this year about it, and it's based on the idea that teaching phonics to everyone is not a good idea (not supported by research), so let's just teach it to whoever needs it.

The problem is almost the same as in the whole language days. The ones who implicitly get the simple and complex code of English are fine. Most every student gets the simple code (CVC words, basic two syllable words), but they don't get the complex code (CVCE, syllabication of three and four syllable words). They also still get taught to guess or use pictures to guess.

I don't teach K or 1, but there is some phonics going on down there; it's just not the complex code they'll need by the time they get to me.

Reading Curriculum:

Ok. This is going to be painful. There is a district curriculum that we are supposed to follow. However, building principals are allowed a lot of discretion in what is actually taught.

Also, we follow the absolutely useless Readers and Writers Workshop curricula. (You might have heard about it in NYC, where they used it for ten years and had absolutely no growth. Thanks, Lucy Calkins.) It's actually recommended in the books/curriculum guides that students only complete 1-2 writing assignments per month; they should revise the same ones repeatedly. Reading and writing assignments are always about student choice and freedom. Supposedly, you become a good reader or writer by pretending to be like one for a long time.

Calkins actually revised a book on workshops for the Common Core, apparently she welcomes its "lesser focus" on the unimportant parts of reading, like phonics (I haven't read the book, but I heard the quote; once again, everyone sees what they want to in the Common Core).

To recap: How do you not teach phonics?

Pretend you can teach it unsystematically in mini lessons without extended practice.

How do you not have a reading curriculum?

Let leaders choose what curriculum will be taught, then choose things like D5/Cafe. Focus on workshops, so students can choose things they like instead of building systematic content knowledge.

OK, I have to ask stupid questions about phonics, because this is not my area at all. What is systematic phonics? How does that differ from the OpenCourt phonics?

I am curious because I have little experience with phonics. I didn't learn to read that way - I learned when I was 5 using look-say, which was the standard method when I was in school. So I can't draw on my own experience. What I saw of OpenCourt appeared to be a never ending series of phonics worksheets and these weird little booklets, each of which emphasized a phonics concept, that they brought home each night. But I don't know what they were doing in school.

I have now watched 3 of my kids learn to read, and have decided that it is an inherently mysterious process. My oldest taught himself at age 4. He appeared to start by trying to write, but I am really not sure what made it work. By kindergarten, he was reading short chapter books, so he largely ignored the OpenCourt worksheets, setting him up for some really bad work habits that plague him to this day.

My second kid is severely hearing impaired, and when he hit kindergarten, he was not reading, could not disambiguate many sounds, and had none of the phonics skills one would expect of a preschooler. Reading tends to be a huge struggle for HI kids. His IEP mandated a specialist in hearing impairment to work with him on phonemic awareness, and we thought his reading would end up being delayed until he had worked through those goals. But we were wrong. Once he was in a school setting, seeing other kids learning to read, he JUST LEARNED TO READ. He still struggled with the OpenCourt phonics sheets, and needed lots of work with the HI specialist to complete them. But he was reading chapter books by the end of kindergarten. His teacher, to her credit, told me she had nothing to do with it, and that he was reading in spite of the curriculum, not because of it. He has read far above grade level for years now, but it is pretty clear he does it visually - he can't sound out words effectively even today.

So for that reason, I didn't have much opinion or experience with the way phonics is taught when my third kid, my daughter, entered kindergarten. She also was not reading. And she had a terrible time learning. She hated the worksheets, she didn't get sounding out, she didn't want to be bothered with sight words, and she was utterly baffled by the nightly OpenCourt booklets (if you saw them, you would be baffled too, lol. Why anyone thinks a kid could make sense of them is a mystery to me). She ended up in the pullout program for struggling readers, where they did a lot of drill. It still didn't seem to help. During first grade, we had her evaluated and I started looking for extra help. I considered a Lindamood-Bell program, which friends had raved about. I think it is some kind of phonics immersion program? But it was really expensive and seemed to be one of those "true believer" programs. In the end, we hired a tutor who was a special ed teacher in another district. She came in armed with lots of comic books (my daughter loves superheroes) and they just practiced. All summer, over and over. And that seemed to do the trick. Once she had practiced enough, and gained some fluency, she discovered she could read Pokemon on her own, and Captain Underpants, and that was it. Now, a year later, at the end of second grade, she is inhaling books and is reading slightly above grade level.

So what did it? Was it the phonics drill? Was it simply practice? Was it discovering books she actually wanted to read? Completely mysterious... All three of my kids were completely mysterious in the way they learned to read. No wonder there is so much controversy in the field of reading education!!

The big difference between systematic and analytic is that students are taught a progression of phonograms in series.

For example, this is where kids learn that a makes the sound at the beginning of the word apple. Each letter is taught in a specific sequence and kids are expected to begin blending the sounds together (this is the simple code - fan, can, etc.).

Good phonics programs also teach the complex code (for example, that ph makes the same sound as f, or that oi and oy make the same sound but one is used at the end of English words and one is not.) They also teach that we generally divide syllables between consonants, that when you add an E to a word it makes the vowel say a longer sound (pan and pane). This is a reference page for what I taught:

http://www.riggsinst.org/phonetics.aspx

It sounds like OpenCourt does this to a point. I don't have any experience with it; I worked with Orton-Gillingham for six years (specifically the Riggs program).

You are right that many kids learn to read without phonics. Many do not. The story of your second child is fascinating. The secret is, as you said, practice. Motivation I'm sure has something to do with it as well. The readers that seem to just learn without phonics are usually internalizing the rules implicitly. That is, they begin to understand the patterns without the need for explicit instruction.

I have a few questions for you:

1. Your second child can't sound out words. When he reads a sentence, what kind of words does he miss? Long words? Multisyllable?

2. When you see a longer word (4-5 syllables, scientific, think medication names) how do you figure out what the word is?

Good readers process the basics of phonics in words so quickly it appears that we don't use phonics. A good phonics program provides instruction in all the different aspects of the code (you can tell bad ones by asking how they teach vowels - most vowels have at least 3 sounds in English).

They also ask students to practice (doing it orally is important) blending sounds together. Finally, the best (like LindaMood Bell) also use it to teach effective spelling.

Here's my final question: When someone asks you to spell a word, what do you see in your mind?

If you see the word on a paper, and then are going through it sound by sound or syllable by syllable, you are using phonics.

I agree we use phonics all the time. I simply meant that I did not learn to read via a formal phonics program (or even a "blended" program), because as I am sure you know, look-say totally dominated school reading programs in the 60's. So I don't know how to evaluate phonics programs because I don't know what they look like. And very frustratingly, I couldn't help my daughter easily when she was having trouble because I didn't know the sounding out patterns or the blending rules that they were using. It was all very foreign to me.

My HI son is an avid reader and a storehouse of knowledge. When he encounters new words, he mainly figures them out by context (I think). And he has far more phonemic awareness now, at age 12, then he did at age 6. But when he reads text aloud, he mispronounces, often badly, many of the more complex words. Which of course means he isn't tying his reading vocabulary to spoken vocabulary very well. When he was younger, he often mispronounced words he had heard as well - for example, he always said "muskrat" instead of "moustache". Now, after years of self advocacy training, he makes us repeat words until he knows how they are pronounced. His HI teacher used a system of visual cues to help him learn to distiguish sounds. I think that is common practice.

Sorry I misunderstood you. In the light of phonics programs, as ChemProf said above, if they focus on sight words that's a red flag.

The research supports systematic phonics, or a program that has a scope and sequence. The Brits support (rightly, I think) systematic synthetic phonics. The idea in that kind of program is you learn the pieces and then use them in words, rather than the analytic way (which is use familiar words, then analyze them for their sounds).

I've commented way too much, but the best programs usually:

1. Teach with a scope and sequence (systematic).2. Teach how to blend sounds into words as they learn phonograms (synthetic).3. Teach simple code first, then complex (this is where a lot programs fail - they don't teach the more complex patterns of English).4. Oral and written practice to encode in long-term memory.

Oh and by the way, the best thing I ever learned for multisyllabic words was to have kids stop and write words on paper or whiteboards. Then they:

1. Put a dot under all the vowels in the word.2. Connect any vowels next to each other (vowel digraphs).3. Go back one sound (not letter) and...

You usually have a syllable break. It's not perfect, but it's a 90 percent rule that gives the kids the ability to chunk the word. Best thing I ever learned in professional development.

The other thing about good systematic phonics, as opposed to the non-systematic program that most balanced literacy uses, is that it builds on itself. If you look at the first McGuffey reader, you can see this -- the first few stories only have a few sounds so are really dull, but once you have those, the stories start combining sounds and get more interesting.

In the other kind of phonics-lite, every little book only has a few sounds, but because kids are never expected to master earlier sounds, every book is dull and weird. Plus they often don't really break sounds down enough, like one I have where the repeated sound is "et", not a short e with lots of different final consonants.

In our area, common core has been great for math. Everyday Math which was used by almost all schools urban, private, suburban, is now being dropped for programs more like Singapore Math or that have a similar Singapore bent.